Everything that is done in the world is done by hope. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jim and I didn’t know Gordon Wright, retired conductor of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and founder of the Arctic Chamber Orchestra who died last week in his cabin south of Anchorage. But we saw him in action once, and what he did is an important memory of ours.
We were working for BLM near the village of Kobuk in the Brooks Range one summer in the late nineteen-seventies. Someone from University of Alaska Fairbanks got word to us that a group of musicians would be flying into the airstrip at Dahl Creek, a longer airstrip than the 1400 or so feet at Kobuk. The university wondered if we could help transport people and instruments down to Kobuk for an afternoon concert.
Kobuk, an Inupiaq village of about 50 people at that time, featured a school for 25 kids, a store, and a small village hall. Television would not arrive until 1980. The postmaster, Guy Moyer, had come up to Alaska to mine gold in the 1930s only to be dropped off on a different lake than he’d intended. He had settled in the area anyway to eventually become a loved grandpa of the town.
Kobuk elders remembered first contacts with whites and had been in front row seats for the dawn of aviation and mining in Alaska. There were people who knew dancing and stories from the mists of time, plus miners’ tunes from the turn of the century. Appalachian hymns rose in Inupiat tongue and voice every Sunday on the CB radio from downriver.
The Kobuk country held startling contrasts. But there had never been a classical chamber orchestra in anyone’s memory.
The weather was beautiful, and that was good, because the twenty or so members of the orchestra, complete with violins, violas, cellos, a gigantic bass fiddle, and great copper kettle timpani were all that would fit in the small plywood hall. Kobukians and the rest of us who came down to town—because the news of the concert was all over the marine radio channel—crowded to listen outside, around the one doorway and the several open windows.
I’d like to say that I remember what they played, but I don’t. Maybe it included Haydn, because I heard Butch Thompson say on Prairie Home Companion last night that Gordon told him the audiences in the small Inupiaq villages loved the Haydn.
What I remember was straining to hear classical melodies I’d never taken in to myself before, played by real people, on instruments I’d never seen with my own eyes. So it turned out I had come all the way from eastern Oregon to see and hear a chamber orchestra on the banks of the Kobuk River.
After the performance of maybe an hour, the performers loaded themselves and their instruments in riverboats owned by the local people and headed downriver for Shungnak, ten twisting river miles away. After that, I heard they traveled by boat or plane to Ambler, to Kiana, and on down the river to Kotzebue.
The last thing I remember of that day was a musician crouched in a johnboat, cradling his bass fiddle against his chest, its long neck extending way above his head. That neck was a prominent mast as the boats motored away from the gravelly bank.
We’ve talked about it over the years, how incongruous it was to hear that music in that place, how it somehow joined the music that already lived there and the hunger for music that seems to live in all people. We are reminded of that day by the death of its author, Gordon Wright.
May generous music travel the wide world forever.